Born Weird

So it’s about time I started writing in this blog. Bear with me; I’ve written very little the last several years so the ride is likely to be a bit bumpy at first. My prose will improve over time. I hope.

Anyway, of the many topics I plan on covering in this space, I’d like to kick things off with a brief discussion regarding Mac software. Specifically, Coda.

I bought Coda last fall after getting tired of some workflow irritations stemming from using a combination of BBEdit, Transmit, svnX, et al. All in all, I love Coda and it has replaced BBEdit as my coding tool of choice. However, it lacks a few features that have me continuing to regularly turn to BBEdit for help. If Coda were to offer the following, I could abandon BBEdit entirely. In no particular order:

Code folding
It’s just so much easier to focus on a particular section of code if you can eliminate the “noise” around it. Plus, I’ve found code folding a fantastic way of identifying problems with other people’s markup (something I find myself doing regularly), such as missing/extraneous end tags.

Auto (re)formatting
Yes, yes, I know I can use HTMLTidy for this as a Mac OS X service. But I find doing so cumbersome, as I need to clean things up with different config settings regularly. Which means either using the command line HTMLTidy or switching TidyService .conf files, neither of which works well in a Coda-contained workflow.

Improved Find/Replace UI
Coda supports multi-file searching and regular expressions, both of which are essential. But I just don’t care for Coda’s interface for these, with only single-line (visible) fields and limited per-directory options. BBEdit’s find/replace gets its own robust dialog, which is far superior.

Tag Wrapping
I often want to wrap a tag around a text selection. BBEdit makes this easy. Coda? Well, it’s true there’s a plugin to do this, but drilling down two levels in a contextual menu to do it seems stupid. It belongs in Coda’s core.

There are other things I’d love to see changed about Coda, of course, but these are the ones that keep me clinging to BBEdit.